This sounds silly but makes a very big difference to the feel of the app.
When dragging & dropping I frequently don’t know if I’m actually doing it.
Issue 1: I don’t know how long to hold the layer for. I need to know when I can start dragging a layer - however, Affinity offers almost no visual feedback Everywhere else in iOS, the item you’re holding ‘pops’ off the screen so you know the item can now be dragged, rather than scrolling your list.
See the GIFs attached and let me know if you can spot the moment the layer goes from held to draggable. It’s possible in affinity, but so much more obvious in Procreate.
Proposed solution: Have the layer ‘pop’ off the screen the moment it is dragable.
Issue 2: I have a long list of layers, and I’m on a multi-touch device, I would normally hold the layer with one finger, and use my other fingers to scroll through the list to find the new spot for my held layers - but that doesn’t work here. (Try it in the files app, or procreate for comparison.)
Proposed solution: make the layers palette respond to multi-touch.

Problems: 1) In the course of changing FX parameters, I will tend to touch an empty area on the screen (sometimes by accident, sometimes thinking to de-select the current object and move on to a different task, etc.). It instantly messes up my FX parameters. This is annoying.
2) de-selecting yourself out of the FX menu, or selecting a different object, is a pain because you have to select the move tool, then click on your new object, then click back on your desired FX. This is too many steps, and requires selecting a tool that you don't actually want to use (ex. move).
3) when you turn an FX on, the bottom bar does not automatically update to show the FX you just enabled. You have to hit the name of the FX instead. This is unintuitive.
Solutions: 1) if you hit an empty area on the screen, the FX menu does not change parameters.
2) to edit a different object's FX, simply click that object to have the bottom bar / FX side studio menu change and reflect that object's settings.
3) if you turn an FX on, change the bottom bar to that FX's setting.
Other thoughts: It other tools and studio interfaces in the program, you can tap an empty spot on the screen to de-select the current object. Or you can tap another object to select that one. Then, the bottom toolbar applies to that newly selected object. FX settings, however, don't work that way. I feel like I constantly have to second-guess what I'm doing when working with FX. "Will this accidentally mess up the parameters I just set? Am I working with the right object? Why don't I see the settings for the FX I just turned on?" etc.

First of all, sorry for the bad pun in the title. But this is my feeling, when I start e.g. APu. Working area on the left monitor and most needed tools on the right monitor. The overall gray appearance between the panels makes it sometimes hard to distinguish them. We have three applications which have a "brand" colour of their own. Why not using these colours inside the applications? E.g. orange headers or orange overlines for the panels in APu?
Just a thought.
P.S.: I know I can use the Dark Theme, but personally dislike it. It is a matter of taste and I am used to it for over thirty years now.

I am sure this has been mentioned but I find the document loading feed back on the trio of the application very poor. Can you please consider using the progress bar dialogue you use when exporting, also on opening documents?
At the moment it is very poor.
Apart from that loving Affinity products and to hell with Adobe!!!

Hello,
Fellow UI designer here, just wanted to suggest a few tweaks to the layers panel,
1. Add an even smaller thumbnail setting and maybe even a no thumbnail setting (Not for me but I think some people might like it). The UI is already scaled quite bigger than I'd like and wastes a lot of space from the actual view window.
2. Add the ability to copy paste things from the layers panel, for example: If I hold down CTRL and drag a layer it should let me make a copy of it. It's different than duplicate because it allows me to put the copy anywhere I want directly.
3. Lock icon in the layer itself, it's annoying having to click the layer and then going up and click the lock icon, I already use the shortcut to lock thing but still, annoying. Maybe make the icon appear alongside the checkmark icon as you hover the cursor on top of the layer?
I hope you address this in the upcoming updates! Thanks.

Maybe covered elsewhere? Right now I am making a bunch of icons on one page, so there are a lot of elements (layers). Unfortunately I did not plan well, making for every icon a new "parent" layer. Creating a "parent" layer and moving elements to them can be quite tedious scrolling and dragging all the time. So a kind of fly-out menu would be nice, where I can specify to which "parent" layer the selected elements belong to.

UPDATE: OOPS - THIS BELONGS IN PHOTO FORUM
Just some quick notes on the New Panorama UI and related issues. I was trying to stitch a 10 image panorama. I had a very slow workflow.
In the UI presented when tapping the button to select photos from Apple's Photos app, there is no option to deselect the square crop view; seeing the entire photo and its orientation helps identify which images to select. Currently it's not an intuitive process.
Also, there seems to be quite a bit of unused space all around the "Images" list and "Panorama" list in the main Panorama UI, which forces one to excessively scroll on the left Images list while trying to decipher the tiny icons' orientation. Same for the Panorama preview list on the right, it is tiny as well. I'm working on an 11" iPad Pro with more limited real estate than the 12.9"
Keep up the great work, the apps are incredible and you guys are trailblazing bringing desktop feature set to mobile device

Hello Affinity,
I was wondering if you guys are going to include a Prototyping Software for UX. I have purchased Affinity Designer and I loved it.
I just wanted to know whether you guys are planning to add Prototyping Persona or maybe lunching a Prototyping software for UX since the User Experience industry is booming. I have created this UI in Affinity Designer and I would want to add interactivity to it. Like add transition effects, design overlays, clickable buttons to go from one artwork to another and record the whole process and render it as a video for user testing. I have also did a mini project and attached it in this form so it could give you guys an idea.
Thank you

Hello Affinity,
I was wondering if you guys are going to include a Prototyping Software for UX. I have purchased Affinity Designer and I loved it.
I just wanted to know whether you guys are planning to add Prototyping Persona or maybe lunching a Prototyping software for UX since the User Experience industry is booming. Like add transition effects, design overlays, clickable buttons to go from one artwork to another and record the whole process and render it as a video for user testing. I have also did a mini project and attached it in this form so it could give you guys an idea.
Thank you
1521_Boroojinejadshirazi_Hossein_A3.mp4

Part of my workflow for doing flat fills on comics and the like is to do a magic-wand selection and then to consistently grow my selection by a fixed amount to "bleed" into the line art, usually by 3 px or so. Every time I open the 'grow / shrink' menu it's reset back to 0, however. I would love a way to always grow by the same amount, either by defining a macro that does it by a specific amount or by having the last amount stay active in the dialog box which comes up.
Additionally, it would be nice if I could use the tab key or similar to change the focus within the dialog box; currently tab just toggles the UI visibility.

Hi guys,
Can anyone tell me how is the compatibility between Affinity Designer and Protopie?
I would like to use AD to design the user interface and be able to animate it in Protopie, is it possible?
Thank you,

The more I tinker with Affinity Photo, the more I run into bad, but quite easy to fix traps. Some of them are caused simply by the fact that a tool behaviour remains stuck the inappropriate positions, so that they block editing in later stages of the project. Here's two:
1) Recently I found out that selection-tools stubbornly remain stuck to their previous Subtractive state even if the user wants to create a fresh selection. The operation fails, although the user has picked the appropriate tool and also has performed the expected motion. Here one badly needed an exception to the rule – selection tools have to create a selection if the tool can not find anything to subtract from. Others suggested that Affinity should beep or show a dialog and by that inform + CTA the user that the tool is in the wrong state – but that would be horrible UX. At that point you could also abolish your assistants too. Don't make me think, don't ask for pointless decisions and action if there's exactly one expected behaviour: Making a (fresh) selection.
2) Today I saw another thing which is even a lot nastier as there's not even a suble visible indicator. One may hide selections (hide the marching ants), which is great. But that hidden state even remains active when the user wants to create a new selection. Such really may not happen. There's absolutly no workflow imaginable where this made sense, this is just a trap and nothing else. A hard to understand trap – imagine you had a selection hidden and go to lunch, afterwards you pick a selection tool and run into what's shown in the GIF. Selection tools always have to revert to state=visible whenever a selection is dropped.
Is there anyone in charge, exclusively for little usability-killers of that kind? It would well be worth it.

Hi,
It would be great if you could support option-click to "collapse all" levels beneath the level clicked in a hierarchy (specifically the layers hierarchy). This is somewhat common in other MacOS software. In complex illustrations/designs it would be an enormous time saver.
Thanks,
Chris

Since I've already expanded a lot on the subject on my last post, I'll keep it short and to the point:
Affinity apps almost completely disregard the macOS system-wide option “Full Keyboard Access: In windows and dialogues, press Tab to move keyboard focus between: All controls”, in the Keyboard prefpane. In fact, they don't even honour the alternative and default “Text boxes and lists only” on all places, which would include the very useful input fields on many different palettes.
There are issues on important dialog boxes such as “New Document”, and the only palettes where fields are properly addressable via tabbing are, AFAIK, the Transform palette, and only partially so. Some allow for tabbing between one or two items, and all of them, regardless of the number of fields, drop the user into the “Tab to hide the Studio” behaviour, instead of cycling back to the first field like in Adobe CC.
This behaviour is, for lack of a nicer term, undesirable and unintuitive, and I could also reproduce it in the Windows beta of Publisher; seeing how I can also reproduce it in the MAS versions of Photo and Designer, I'm willing to bet that it's also reproducible in the release-quality Windows versions of those as well. I also noticed input field and UI control ordering inconsistencies between the Mac and the Windows versions of Publisher.
I am aware that fixing this would require an overhaul (or at least an internal review process) of six different codebases across two different OSes (though the fact that some palettes and dialogues are rather similar across apps, so there should at least be some economies of scale at work there), and introduce further overhead in your development process from now on (because it does indeed require a change in philosophy, as tabbing has up until now been added just as an afterthought and only in the places where we specifically asked for it, instead of everywhere, organically and by default, following a predictable scheme and behaviour), but this is yet another thing which I believe you also must do in order to be taken seriously by design professionals who actually use your apps for UI and UX work; you must lead by example, because many of your users will know a lot about that very subject.
For the same reason, Adobe was the butt of all jokes for the better part of a decade on account of their lack of polish and consistency (there's even a Tumblr page called “Adobe Gripes” [formerly “Adobe UI Gripes”] dedicated to their misgivings: https://adobegripes.tumblr.com ), but even they got their act somewhat together as of late (there are still inconsistencies between different apps of their suite, but at least most of these nitty-gritty UX issues are pretty much solved by now). Seeing how you're still in the beginning of your expansion in the market, and only have 3 apps in two platforms to contend with, please take the opportunity to polish all of them before the arguably momentous 1.7 release, which will mark the completeness of the originally announced Affinity 1.x suite. All eyes will be, then and once more, on you, and some reviewers will possibly go through all those details (maybe even making brand-new reviews of the original first two apps), and call them all unpolished or unfinished. I know I would, because that's the way they feel, at least on this major point in particular.

Hello. My name is Vitaly, I am UX/UI designer from Russia. In my free time I decided to redesign my beloved Affinity Designer. What I did can be viewed at the link below. What do you say, colleagues? View on Behance

There it goes, my inspiration that is, out of the window, and I lost it trying to change who knows what shortcut key... again.
As a professional in video, animation, 3d and audio I have used many many applications over the years, and find Affinity package a real refreshing leap forward. However, I must admit that the preferences window across all three Affinity apps (Photo, Designer and Publisher) is one of the most useless I have ever encountered. I am not afraid to switch and learn applications and am ready to customize the new ones I learn to my own best practices, and the preferences window is my friend or it should be, but Affinity's is not at all. Please let me try to explain what I find is wrong with and suggest some changes which I did not think a lot about, but seem much simpler to use. Let's start:
1. The preferences window uses a unique visual paradigm, completely different from any other dialogue I have encountered in the rest of the application. It has a header with Back/forward buttons, "home" button (with an odd icon and a drop-down menu) and search bar. No other panel, toolbar, manager, assistant or any other window in Affinity uses this paradigm or at least my humble knowledge of the app does not bring any into the mind. I doubt that this is good. For instance having tabs, like some other windows would do the trick no need for back/forward buttons, no need for home button, no need for drop-down menu, just 7 simple instantly accessable tabs.
2. search bar is a sneaky red herring! It is in fact dangerously useless! I'd like to change a shortcut for brush size in pixel persona? typing any of these terms does not help me to find where to do it. It seems that this search bar is good for searching only a couple of dozen words which does not make any sense at all, either you make every single preference item that can be change searchable or get rid of the search bar because the way it is now is frustratingly useless.
3. I will not go in depth on my thoughts about "General", "Color", "Performance", "User Interface" and "Tools" pages as I do see some benefit of "bite sized" preferences pages even if some items on them seem to belong to another page, and the number of these pages could actually be decreased. (for instance half of the "Tools" preferences could easily belong to "User Interface" tab)
4. Checkboxes, since they have really powerful results would benefit from tooltip help with a more verbose description of what they do.
5. "Miscellaneous" could easily be renamed to "factory resets" or something on that line, as that is what it does.
6. And now I come to my nemesis, the "Keyboard Shortcuts" page. Where to start?!
a) there is a search bar on the upper right, that is as we said a sneaky trap, and a red herring. It does not help us here, and will take us "home" probably finding nothing of interest.
b) we need to use these two fiddly drop-downs. The first one could easily be replaced with beautiful Draw, Pixel and Export icons cutting the number of actions for picking persona to edit to only one click (or even better none.. read on). The second one is really unintuitive as its items partially overlap in different personas. It took me a while to get the idea that this second one is contextual to the first one (as the list changes "behind the curtain")... I got it only after learning my way a bit around the app so I recognised that some items belong to some personas.
c) a quick overview of other buttons and check boxes in this upper region of Keyboard Shortcuts page;
"Apply to all" -what? to all what? I had to dig through the manual to see what it does, and all it would take to fix it is to call it "apply shortcut changes to all personas" without this information there is no way to know that there actually are some connections possible between personas. As if the for instance, brush size in pixel and draw persona must be separate.
"Ignore Modifier—Lets you create shortcuts using a single letter designation instead of using keyboard modifiers." says the manual, and I still do not get it. Does it allow me to pres only the letter in application without modifier keys and get what I want? No, as Ctrl+S is stil "save" and "Ctrl+Shift+S" is stil Save as. Does it filter out the input of Modifier keys while assigning new shortcuts? No. So what does it do? Maybe a better explanation in manual would help, and a more verbose checkbox title or tooltip.
"Load/Save" what? it loads and saves what? a file obviously, but what does that file contain? All shortcuts, or only those in focus? Maybe "Load Shortcut configuration" or something on that line would be better. to be continued...

Hey there,
I've been using Affinity Photo for quite some time now, I used Photoshop before. I tried my best to align with Affinity but I always felt, that something.. was off.
Don't get me wrong, Affinity Photo is great, you can do much things it can do stuff better than Photoshop in some cases, but there is something other than It's features that just puts me off, and gives me a feeling that there is just something wrong with the programm.
I recently let my girlfriend, someone who had no experience with any type of graphics programm work with both Affinity and PS. The result kinda got stuck in my head: Affinity is just weird to use.
Basic things like filling a selection are akwardly placed in either a sub menu or on the side bar. Certain Key Bindings can't be altered (ignoring that finding certain keybindings in the options can be super frustrating), but I'm not sure if that's a bug, as another user stated that he could insert that certain keybinding (maybe got something to do with german keyboard layout / windows?). And generally working with menus is a hassle.
From my point of view, Affinity needs a major UX update, especially for first time users it feels bad to traverse, even as someone who stuck some hours into it still feels off.
This became inherintly clear to me after opening the Publisher Open Beta, as it is advertised as "leightweight" while sharing the same cluttered UI, but I guess I should also ask what others think about this, what are your experience do you feel the learning curve is off due to certain UI/UX decisions?

The new Affinity designer for iPad looks and feels awesome.
I would love to see a similar version of the Designer on Windows 10 which uses the full potential of the Windows 10 touch functionalities. A direct copy of the iPad UI could be awesome.

Redesign concept of the Steam client. This concept aims to make the navigation of the app more intuitive and giving it a clean, smooth, more visual appealing design overall. More screens will follow in the future.
What do you guys think?
Feel free to follow me on: Dribbble Behance Twitter silentandclear.com
(revised version of Original project)

Hi there,
Blacknut - Get instant access to a vast collection of premium games with a single click. https://www.blacknut.com
All plateforms (desktop, android tv, firetv, android, ios...) done with Designer & Photo on iPad Pro and Macbook 15" (because designer not available on iPad.... ) ...

Hi everyone!
I would like to receive critique for the following redesign concept: https://dribbble.com/shots/4560443-Steam-redesign
Hit me from left and from right, I can take a beating!
Thanks in advance!

Hello there,
I'm new here, so please bear with me. Been playing with AD for a couple of days (Awesome piece of software!), and here is my first professional work using it (I made this for my client). Hope you like it!